With the increasing availability of large, spatially-indexed data banks and the emergence of sophisticated geo-processing systems, agricultural geographers are now in a position to undertake much more detailed and wide-ranging investigations into the typological and regional structure of farming systems. These technological develop-ments also allow a more experimental and critical stance to be adopted in studies of a taxonomic (classificatory) nature. This is important since classification is essentially an exploratory process — a search for meaningful or revealing patterns of order within complex multivariate data sets. It is not a search for single solutions that can be regarded as "definitive" or "true". Typologies and regionalizations can be effected in many different ways, and it behoves would be taxonomists to test and evaluate a range of classificatory models, and to justify the categorizations that are eventually selected for subsequent interpretation. Needless to say, the fact that it is now a relatively simple matter to generate maps and plots of classified units aids this process of experimen-tation considerably, for from a geographer's point of view it is often the meaningfulness of the resultant spatial distributions that is of paramount diagnostic importance. It is not possible here to examine these various issues in great detail; the more limited aim is to consider the general problem of classifying large sets of agricultural data. In so doing, particular emphasis will be placed on "iterative partitioning" methods of cluster analysis.

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John William Aitchison, Department of Geography, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK

The present decade has seen a gradual rebuilding of agricultural productivity in Poland after the economic crisis at the end of the 1970s. This improvement has been accompanied by a change of policy with regard to the treatment of the two sectors of production — the socialized or state and cooperative sector and the private or individual farms sector — that is by the introduction of more equal treatment of the two sectors with, at the same time, the confirmation of the private sector as a permanent element of the socialist structure in Poland. It is important to note that the private sector occupies approximately three-quarters of the national farmed area or area in "agricultural uses" — reduced from 79% in 1975 to 74.5% in 1980 and rising again to 76.5% in 1985 (calculated from GUS 1986A, 70). In the new policy the principles of profitability and self-financing in agriculture have been accepted and the abolition of subsidies in the socialized sector has been proposed, together with a new prices policy, intended to improve the relationship between retail prices, product prices and the prices of agricultural resources and services (Olszewski 1985, 89). The aim of the new policy is to achieve national self-sufficiency in food production and increased export of agricultural produce — difficult targets to achieve after the economic difficulties experienced and given the level of food and livestock feed imports which were thought necessary in the 1970s, even at the peak of agricultural productivity.

More than other branches of economy, agriculture is characterized by a close connection between the general socio-economic development and the natural and socio-economic factors differentiated regionally. The regular regional differentiations require adaptation of organization and management of agriculture to the concrete territorial resources. This is the real basis of the scientific agricultural geography. In the following we will examine at first territorial aspects of the main branches of agricultural production in the GDR. Then follows an attempt to give an all-round geographical typology of the agriculture in the GDR.

India, due to its vast size and enormous relief, has large variations in soil, climate, vegetation etc, and is able to produce most of the agricultural products of the world. A phase of growing emphasis on agricultural planning and intensive development of agriculture began in the country during the recent plan periods, particularly after 1951. Some of these were due to changed land laws, some because of organized technical advances in agricultural enterprises, some due to receptivity and response of the assiduous farming communities and significantly due to the expansion of irrigation facilities. These changes improved the use of agricultural land, increased the yield per hectare and brought about an all-round development of rural sector placing the agricultural progress on a permanent footing. In spite of this improvement, there are still weaker and poor areas, covering vast expanse, where the level of agricultural production is much below the National index. Thus, an overall detail assessment of social, cultural, political and economic conditions and their reasonable régionalisation is needed.